I am a big Robert Zemeckis fan. He caught my attention way back in 1980 with the comedy Used Cars which he directed. Stephen Spielberg was the producer.
He went on to make the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), and A Christmas Carol (2009). It’s an eclectic body of work with perhaps one thing in common. They always seemed to be on the cutting edge of moviemaking technology. They are ambitious projects that push the boundaries of cinema. Zemeckis seems to constantly challenge himself by continually raising the stakes.
His latest release Here, is a story that spans millions of years with essentially a locked down camera. It’s a tale that begins in the distant past when dinosaurs roamed the earth and asteroid strikes, climate change and the Ice Age set the stage for arrival of human beings. It’s a fascinating idea—to stand on one small spot of land and imagine what might have occurred on that exact spot a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, or a million years ago. It’s mind blowing.
Zemeckis and his co-writers Eric Roth and Richard McGuire attempt to do just that, traveling back in time to pre-history and then skipping ahead in time to the lives of Native Americans and a succession of American families from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present day.
It is an epic sweep of events covering the stories of a half dozen families who occupied this geographical spot over the span of centuries. We see the first house constructed on the site, facing what we discover to be the home of Benjamin Franklin. Years later, a second house is built on the same plot of land and the imaginary camera continues to occupy a solitary position that captures the living room and the view out the front window.
What we witness might be considered mundane. It’s the collective family experience of birth, life and death; of happiness and sadness; of success and failure; of dreams fulfilled and dreams never realized.
It’s the human experience, something that we can all relate to, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
One of the sub stories is a fictionalized story of the man who invents the La-Z-Boy reclining chair. It’s a running gag providing comic relief. Other stories are more serious, dealing with employment issues, financial problems, the stress of raising children and caring for aging parents. You could argue that nothing much happens in Here. It’s not a movie with big, dramatic moments or shocking revelations, but the whole of the story is definitely bigger than the individual parts when it comes to the emotional impact it delivers.
Like so many of Robert Zemeckis’s earlier work, Here is a wildly ambitious project. One could argue that there are too many storylines and characters. The story is not linear or chronological, it skips back and forth in time, sometimes abruptly.
Stylistically, the theater screen is an ongoing montage of frames within the frame that transition between the multiple story lines. Audiences and critics will either love the approach or hate it. It’s a matter of taste and the viewer’s ability to let go and accept the movie on its own terms.
Here marks the highly touted reunion of Robert Zemeckis and the stars of Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Hanks and Wright are digitally de-aged in order to play their characters as teenagers who fall in love, marry, have children and eventually grow old together. They are the central characters throughout.
The remarkable thing about the movie is the camera that never moves throughout the entire film until the very end, and with maximum effect. It’s a bold creative choice, reminiscent to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Lifeboat (1944) in which the whole movie takes place on a small lifeboat adrift at sea.
Impressive as that film was, it didn’t tackle a span of time that stretched across several million years.
In the end, Robert Zemeckis deserves credit for the courage and creativity required to make a movie like Here. Despite its flaws, including the kind of line deliveries that one would expect to hear in live theater production, it is a film that manages to be entertaining on its own terms and, at times, deeply emotional.
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